How to REALLY learn a piece - Allemande or die!

I guess we've all heard the excellent advice from our guitar teachers: spend the time on the hard bits, take it slow enough to play it right, record yourself, listen back to that recording, no- listen back to that recording with the score; yes and remember to mark the score with the bits to practice.   I have to say I've done some of all of these in the past, but maybe not of all of them.  But the Bach finally forced the issue  - it was obvious I couldn't fumble my way through it  - there were just so many challenges: finger sequencing to stop various strings from ringing, bringing out different voices, fretting things that were difficult for my hands, maintaining legato, dynamics, not breaking up the musical line... keeping in time.... the list goes on!  Our group (named by one enterprising individual "the Allemanders") decided to forge ahead with more sections of the Bach after the official challenge finished, and meantime I have been working on the first half too, and trying to relearn another piece for a masterclass with a number of challenges I had never completely sorted out.  Time is limited.  My hands can't do the number of hours practice that might be require using my old techniques.  Time to get it together.  First I recorded the other piece (I'll call it piece "B) on my phone, warts and all.  Then I identified all the parts where I was stumbling on the score, took each of them very slowly and tried to figure out why I was failing and what needed to be done to correct the issue.  Then, and here's the crucial difference, I took it another step - I wrote down the problems as a list, noting the specific problem and what I had come up with to solve it.  It looks something like this:

MM 2 and subsequent: Barre damping off one note.  Solution - place barre finger further back
MM 16  late transition as key changes: memory issue - practice just the transition
MM 23 Em descending scale campanella: damping off 4th string while fretting  5th : solution - move hand further over to keep finger more upright.
MM30-33  Confusing section with changing rhythm, positions and RH finger sequence: practice each transition separately, practice RH alone, memorize the start notes for each position.
MM  35-36: damping off notes bc of big stretch: solution - fret notes off fret so fingers can reach.
MM 37 late to harmonic, it sometimes doesn't sound right:  practice just the transition.  Remember to touch i first before trying play harmonic with a.
MM 42  hesitation - practice transition
MM  44 memory slip in upper position - practice super slowly, memorize notes,  so not relying just on the sequence.

A lot of work?  Perhaps - actually it took much less time to write it in my notebook as I used many fewer words!   So now when I come to practice the piece, I go to my list, review what I'm supposed to be doing differently.  Then I practice those measures, finishing with linking them up to adjacent parts of the music.  I'm making progress - wish me luck I get it solid  enough for a masterclass in a couple of weeks!

BWV 996 Allemande excerpt to show progress over 1 month

Well it’s been a busy few months. Orchestra had 3 concerts at the beginning of  May and is now done for a while, and finals of beginner music theory loom next week. My ears can’t say they are well trained but they hear more than they used to.  On to the next thing...
Started to work on materials for grade 7, which apparently involves actually understanding the music rather than just learning the notes, so all the music theory may be useful after all.

This month, the classical guitar corner academy set a challenge: take a prescribed section of one of the pieces of the grade repertoire, and work on it for a month. Make one video a week to document progress and get feedback. My piece is the last 6 measures of Bach’s Allemande, BWV 996. After some discussion about voices, etc. my GT suggested making a video to demo what I was trying to achieve for this week’s video. I briefly thought about doing this via musescore.com, but rapidly ditched that idea because I haven’t yet figured out how to put several voices on one staff in musescore. So back to technology I can handle. As sleep was a faithless friend this morning I got up at some ridiculously early hour to put the pieces together. How? First I marked up a copy of the music with highlighters to isolate the voices/repeating motifs.  Then I used my iphone to take pictures of each measure. These came out pretty dim, so I edited them with photoshop, then dragged them into my favorite  video editor ( movavi). Then it was merely a matter of recording the section on the iPhone using the twisted wave app, exporting the .wav file to movavi and lining things up. OK I accidentally chopped off a bit of the music, my lining up is a bit approximate,  and I’m still working on the playing aspect, but for a couple hours work it didn't turn out that badly... hopefully with a week’s practice next week’s video will be more polished!

https://youtu.be/mqdqhvZSskc

Edit:  so we are a couple of weeks on, and I thought it would be interesting to post progress.  In the meantime, I've been reading " The practice of practice" book by Jonathan Harnum.   One of the things he talks about in the early chapters is how music practice can incorporate many other things apart from sitting down with your guitar and playing - including listening to others play the piece.  I'm always fascinated by how my listening changes as I get to know a piece, and although I had listened to a number of versions of the Allemande before starting to learn it, going back and listening again was illuminating now that I can think about other things apart from just playing the notes. Where exactly should the crescendos (and decrescendos) fall?  Which voices or notes should be brought out? How much rubato? The 2 versions I listen to most on YT are Matthias Lang and Classicalguitar2.  The first is a virtuosic rendition, encompassing superb phrasing, perfectly controlled dynamics and speed with considerable rubato.  The second to my ears has less fire and excitement, but with its slower more nuanced approach suits me better.  Both bring out a part of the melody I hadn't noticed before, so the current challenge is to incorporate that.  Regardless,  I'm going to keep working on it and listen again for what pops out in another couple of weeks, but here is where it is now. 
Final update: a little late on this, but more to come in the next post.  This is where it went after another 2 weeks - still slow, but a bit more fluid.
https://youtu.be/s3EMRysFfOg

Yikes! music theory is not quite what I expected

I am the epitome of a guitar hobbyist - I delve into things as they interest me, and  usually launch myself at them with little thought of an overall plan.  This, up to now, is how I've pursued my classical guitar hobby.  However as I pass the 5 year mark taking CG lessons with the same teacher (who apparently has the patience of a saint), I am determined to learn a little more apart from how to sequence my fingers to make a pleasant sound on the guitar.  As I have now officially retired from my full time position, I have been able to enroll in music theory 101 in a local college.  The class is small, and as expected, I'm the only old person in the class.  That being said, because the students are all different - performance majors, education majors, music minors... with instruments varying from clarinet to percussion to voice,  it's quite an eclectic group even without me.    So far the theory is pretty basic, but moving fast - in a couple of lessons we've already been through the major scales in every key, plus notation in treble and bass clefs.  I'm glad I remember something from piano lessons as a kid because everything is based on the piano keyboard.  I tell myself this is because the piano is so much easier than the guitar. 😉

The challenging part is the ear training. Who knew that singing solfege was going to be a major part of it?  Oh well - it's other peoples' ears that will suffer.  Actually the ear training is the main reason I'm doing it in person rather than online - I'd probably do fine with an online theory course such as that offered by ABRSM, but the ear training is another matter. I figure it's got to help my playing (and my eventual goal to arrange music for the guitar)  to be able to "hear' the music without actually playing it ...

Progress forward on actually 'playing' the guitar has come to a grinding halt.  While life is getting in the way, I'm taking a break from trying to inch my playing up a notch and instead am going back to relearn some easier pieces.  First on the docket is Birds Flew over the Spire by Gary Ryan.  It would be nice if I can do a more convincing performance of it with the benefit of a couple of years practice.  We shall see.  I've also been half-heartedly looking through the pieces for orchestra, which are great pieces that however are full of funky Latin rhythms ( I can just see the conductor getting increasingly steamed as we totally botch it).  Today's project is to get some of them into musescore because  counting just isn't cutting it...